Related Tags

Ocado tops grocery website usability study

Ecommerce is still a relatively small part of the overall grocery industry, making up just 3.4% of sales.

However it’s growing rapidly, and in October it was estimated that Tesco received almost 10m visits to its site while Asda received around 5m.

With this in mind, QuBit has published a new usability benchmark that compares the onsite performance and user experience of the top five UK online supermarkets: Tesco, Asda, Ocado, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s.

In the latest report, Ocado comes out on top with a total score of 74% followed by Tesco (66%) and Waitrose (65%). However though Ocado scored top marks in the early stage of the purchase journey, Tesco achieved top marks for the checkout process.

Here is a roundup of some of the report's findings...

Onsite search

QuBit’s report evaluates three separate parts of the customer journey that it labels as find, choose and buy.

A key part of the ‘find’ criteria in the grocery industry is onsite search due to the many different alternatives for each different product. According to the report, the search field should be easily located on the homepage and very visible.

Asda, Ocado and Tesco provided useful multisearch functionality, allowing the shopper to search for multiple groceries by entering their shopping list. Ocado stood out as the only website to provide a predictive search facility.

Search results

Ocado also came out on top in the ‘choose’ section, which looks at the quality of search results and the product pages.

All the websites were found to provide excellent search tools, though Sainsbury’s was the only website that did not provide a function to filter search results.

Waitrose stood out in this area, allowing the user to filter not only by brand, price and type, but also by fairtrade, organic, vegan, new, avoiding gluten and several other options.

However the extensive search options actually had a negative impact on usability, as when searching for a product that sits under several categories there are so many filtering options that they cover the whole area above the fold - forcing the user to scroll down to the middle of the page before being able to view any results.

Product pages

We’ve previously blogged about the importance of including as much detail as possible – including descriptions and images – on product pages, and QuBit’s report shows that all retailers included the most necessary product information such as nutrition, storage and ingredients.

However, only Ocado included user reviews, the average life of the product and a zoom function on its product pages. That said, none of the product pages that I looked at actually included any consumers reviews even though the option was there.

Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s also took advantage of the opportunity to display relevant cross sells and alternatives to the current product being viewed.

Registration

Scores for the ‘buy’ section of the report were low across the board, with Tesco coming out on top with just 59%.

Checkout

In contrast, Ocado has a massive ten steps in its checkout process, which is highly likely to cause some users to abandon the purchase.

Furthermore, none of the websites in the benchmark accept third party payment solutions, such as PayPal, or provide a secure site seal to reassure shoppers.

For examples of well designed checkouts read our blog posts on Quiksilver and ASOS, both of which reduce the chances of basket abandonment by closely following best practice and limiting the barriers to purchase.

One very annoying thing with Ocado is on the product pages, when you open if you try to click Add straight away the add button moves around as the social share buttons take a bit longer to load pushing the button down whilst you are trying to press it. Showing these buttons tot he side or below the Add button would fix this :-)

Enjoying this article?

Get more just like this, delivered to your inbox.

Keep up to date with the latest analysis, inspiration and learning from the Econsultancy blog with our free Digital Pulse newsletter. You will receive a hand-picked digest of the latest and greatest articles, as well as snippets of new market data, best practice guides and trends research.